Caliber of VP's character unchanged

By MARIANNE MEANS, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

Published
10:00 pm PST, Monday, February 20, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney's reluctance to be forthcoming immediately about his hunting accident revives familiar questions about the degree of privacy appropriate for a powerful elected official.

In this case, the shooting accident took place during a hunting party in Texas that was not on Cheney's official schedule, nor was he accompanied by any members of his staff or the White House press corps.

Cheney's group did include, however, a medical aide, an ambulance and lots of Secret Service, all financed by taxpayers.

His defenders insisted he was acting as a private citizen rather than in an official policy-making capacity and therefore had no obligation to personally disclose what happened. This, however, overlooked the inconvenient reality that he has a permanent duty to serve the voters who put him in office.

His right to personal privacy is not absolute. Even more controversial, however, is his insistence on a right to official privacy, keeping his meetings secret and his appearances scripted.

It was not until a belated television interview with a friendly reporter on a Republican-friendly cable channel four days after the shooting that Cheney finally tried to quash the public outcry that his strained silence had prompted.

He took responsibility for the shooting, although he did not explicitly apologize. He refused to join the early, widely mocked political spin that had suggested the victim, Harry Whittington, was at fault for not notifying Cheney he was approaching. But Cheney also slyly referred to "the other conditions that existed at the time," raising possible excuses. He described his vision as affected by a setting sun and Whittington's location slightly below him in a nearby shallow gully.

And Cheney adamantly refused to concede that he had miscalculated by failing to make a timely disclosure or to promptly publicly express remorse. Instead, he reverted to the familiar snarling Cheney, mocking White House reporters as jealous that the local newspaper had been notified before they had. "They didn't like the idea," he griped.

The basic truth is that Cheney behaves as though he believes he is above the law. Several Cheney friends said that he simply doesn't give a fig for public popularity. (Good thing, too, since he doesn't have much.)

Former House Republican leader Robert Michel observed that the vice president is "virtually immune to public criticism and image problems. I don't think he really cares." It is often said Cheney doesn't care because he has no further political ambitions; he is not going to run for president. But that's a narrow, self-serving reason.

Shouldn't he care about the country? Doesn't a vice president have public obligations larger than merely pleasing screened partisan audiences? Would it be such an embarrassment to express remorse or admit mistakes?

This cold, indifferent attitude shaped his mishandling of the shooting incident. The White House staff has been letting reporters know many of them had urged Cheney to promptly disclose the full story. But he didn't talk directly to the president about the incident until Monday, two days later. This is inconceivable for two men who are supposed to be as entwined as we have been led to believe Cheney and Bush are. The president of the United States wasn't impatient to learn how his second-in-command came to shoot a man?

Cheney's intimate relationship with President Bush and the White House staff has now been exposed as convoluted, at best. The reality is still hidden in the mists of the secrecy cocoon the administration has constructed around the Bush inner circle. But in every political story there comes a tipping point, when the limits of tolerant approval are reached.

Cheney's dead-wrong statements about Iraq, his peddling of classified information, his distortion of terrorist intelligence and the indictment for perjury of his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have begun to add up.

What that may mean for Cheney is unclear, but national Republican politics is likely to look very differently from now on. Cheney the fearsome has morphed into Cheney the klutz.